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This volume explores issues of black female identity through the various "imaginings" of the black female body in print and visual culture. Contributions emphasize the ways in which the black female body is framed and how black women (and their allies) have sought to write themselves back into social discourses on their terms.
This book is a practical and theoretical exploration of the embodied imagining processes of devised performance in which the human and more-than-human are co-implicated in the creative process. This study brings together the work of French theatre pedagogue Jacques Lecoq (1921–1999) and French philosopher of science and the imagination Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) to explore the notion of the imagination as embodied, enactive and embedded in the devising process. An exploration of compelling correspondences with Bachelard, whose writings imbue Lecoq’s teaching ethos, offers new practical and theoretical perspectives on Lecoq’s ‘poetic body’ in contemporary devising practices. Interweaving first-hand accounts by the author and interviews with contemporary international creative practitioners who have graduated from or have been deeply influenced by Lecoq, Imagining Bodies in Performer Training interrogates how his teachings have been adapted, developed and extended in various cultural, political and historical settings, in Europe, Scandinavia, Asia, and North and South America. These new and rich insights reveal a teaching approach that resists fixity and instead unfolds, develops and adapts to the diverse cultural and political contexts of its practitioners, teachers and students.
Sites, Bodies and Stories examines the intimate links between history and heritage as they have developed in postcolonial Indonesia. Sites discussed in the book include Borobudur in Central Java, a village in Flores built around megalithic formations, and ancestral houses in Alor. Bodies refers to legacies of physical anthropology, exhibition practices and Hollywood movies. The Stories are accounts of the Mambesak movement in Papua, the inclusion of wayang puppetry in UNESCO s List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, and subaltern history as written by the people of Blambangan in their search for national heroes. Throughout the book, citizenship entitlement figures as a leitmotif in heritage initiatives. Contemporary heritage formation in Indonesia is intrinsically linked to a canon of Indonesian art and culture developed during Dutch colonial rule, institutionalized within Indonesia's heritage infrastructure and in the Netherlands, and echoed in museums and exhibitions throughout the world. The authors in this volume acknowledge colonial legacies but argue against a colonial determinism, considering instead how contemporary heritage initiatives can lead to new interpretations of the past.
In Bodies and Bones, Tanya Shields argues that a repeated engagement with the Caribbean’s iconic and historic touchstones offers a new sense of (inter)national belonging that brings an alternative and dynamic vision to the gendered legacy of brutality against black bodies, flesh, and bone. Using a distinctive methodology she calls "feminist rehearsal" to chart the Caribbean’s multiple and contradictory accounts of historical events, the author highlights the gendered and emergent connections between art, history, and belonging. By drawing on a significant range of genres—novels, short stories, poetry, plays, public statuary, and painting—Shields proposes innovative interpretations of the work of Grace Nichols, Pauline Melville, Fred D’Aguiar, Alejo Carpentier, Edwidge Danticat, Aimé Césaire, Marie-Hélène Cauvin, and Rose Marie Desruisseau. She shows how empathetic alliances can challenge both hierarchical institutions and regressive nationalisms and facilitate more democratic interaction.
Medical imaging technologies can help diagnose and monitor patients' diseases, but they do not capture the lived experience of illness. In this volume, Devan Stahl shares her story of being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis with the aid of magnetic resonance images (MRIs). Although clinically useful, Stahl did not want these images to be the primary way she or anyone else understood her disease or what it is like to live with MS. With the help of her printmaker sister, Darian Goldin Stahl, they were able to reframe these images into works of art. The result is an altogether different image of the ill body. Now, the Stahls open up their project to four additional scholars to help shed light on the meaning of illness and the impact medical imaging can have on our cultural imagination. Using their insights from the medical humanities, literature, visual culture, philosophy, and theology, the scholars in this volume advance the discourse of the ill body, adding interpretations and insights from their disciplinary fields.
In this erudite and profusely illustrated history of perception, Barbara Stafford explores a remarkable set of body metaphors deriving from both aesthetic and medical practices that were developed during the enlightenment for making visible the unseeable aspects of the world. While she focuses on these metaphors as a reflection of the changing attitudes toward the human body during the period of birth of the modern world, she also presents a strong argument for our need to recognize the occurrence of a profound revolution—a radical shift from a textbased to a visually centered culture. Stafford agues, in fact, that modern societies need to develop innovative, nonlinguistic paradigms and to train a broad public in visual aptitude.
'Imagining Sex' examines a variety of material from 17th century England to argue that, unlike today, pornography was not a discrete genre, nor was it usually subject to suppression. The book explores contemporary thinking on these issues and wider cultural concerns.
Reacting to the rising numbers of mixed-blood (Spanish-Indian-Black African) people in its New Spain colony, the eighteenth-century Bourbon government of Spain attempted to categorize and control its colonial subjects through increasing social regulation of their bodies and the spaces they inhabited. The discourse of calidad(status) and raza(lineage) on which the regulations were based also found expression in the visual culture of New Spain, particularly in the unique genre of castapaintings, which purported to portray discrete categories of mixed-blood plebeians. Using an interdisciplinary approach that also considers legal, literary, and religious documents of the period, Magali Carrera focuses on eighteenth-century portraiture and castapaintings to understand how the people and spaces of New Spain were conceptualized and visualized. She explains how these visual practices emphasized a seeming realism that constructed colonial bodies--elite and non-elite--as knowable and visible. At the same time, however, she argues that the chaotic specificity of the lives and lived conditions in eighteenth-century New Spain belied the illusion of social orderliness and totality narrated in its visual art. Ultimately, she concludes, the inherent ambiguity of the colonial body and its spaces brought chaos to all dreams of order.
An Empty Room is a transformative journey through butoh, an avant-garde form of performance art that originated in Japan in the late 1950's and is now a global phenomenon. This is the first book about butoh authored by a scholar-practitioner who combines personal experience with ethnographic and historical accounts alongside over twenty photos. Author Michael Sakamoto traverses butoh dance history from its roots in post-World War II Japan to its diaspora in the West in the 1970s and 1980s. An Empty Room delves into the archive of butoh dance, gathering testimony from multiple generations of artists active in Japan, the US, and Europe. The book also creatively highlights seminal visual and written texts, especially Hosoe Eikoh's photo essay, "Kamaitachi," and Hijikata Tatsumi's early essays. Sakamoto ultimately fashions an original view of what butoh has been, is and, more importantly, can be through the lens of literary criticism, photo studies, folklore, political theory, and his experience performing, photographing, teaching, and lecturing in 15 countries worldwide.
Deep and wide study of 2,000 years of Christian thought on the human body Does Christianity scorn our bodies? Friedrich Nietzsche thought so, and many others since him have thought the same. Ola Sigurdson contends, to the contrary, that Christianity — understood properly — in fact affirms human embodiment. Presenting his constructive contributions to theology in relation to both historical and contemporary conceptions of the body, Sigurdson begins by investigating the anthropological implications of the doctrine of the incarnation. He then delves into the concept of the gaze and discusses a specifically Christian "gaze of faith" that focuses on God embodied in Jesus. Finally, he weaves these strands into a contemporary Christian theology of embodiment. Sigurdson's profound engagement with the whole history of Christian life and thought not only elucidates the spectrum of Christian perspectives on the body but also models a way of thinking historically and systematically that other theologians will find stimulating and challenging.